SimBrad
Once again, it's time to play catch-up on what I've been doing.
First and foremost, it's been announced (more or less) by Aspyr that we're publishing The Sims 2 for the Mac, which I'm sure will come as a surprise to no one. For almost a month now, John and I have been slaving over the code, pushing it further and further along. This has been a fairly monumental task, and I'm frankly shocked at how far we've been able to move it. In general, it's hard to have 2 people working on the codebase during the early set-up, but Sims2 is so huge and so broad in scope, that there are plenty of opportunities for us to focus on two wholly separate parts of the code at the same time this early on.
Internally, the game uses DirectX 9, along with the high-level shading language features, which will shortly prove to be a very thrilling part of the porting process. :) One of the stipulations of working for Aspyr is that I'm somewhat limited in what I can say publicly, particularly if it could be construed as negative, so I'll probably have to word my statements carefully. :) Suffice to say that Sims2 will probably be the most challenging port I've worked on to date. I'm grateful that John has a firm grasp on DirectX vs. OpenGL concepts, because left to my own devices, I'd probably be white-haired and throwing cats at strangers by now.
Aside from that, I had hoped to have a new MacMAME release out last week, but I was simply overwhelmed with Sims2 work during the days to want to spend much time at night to clean it up. However, I have finished the joystick code rewrite so it won't be too much farther off, I think.
A few people have asked about the Jedi Academy patch. To be honest, I haven't given it (or anything else) much thought since I started on Sims2 a few weeks back. In a day or two, I'm going to have to re-visit the Medal of Honor/Spearhead patches to work around a massive deficiency work with an ever-so-delightful implementation detail in Stuffit InstallerMaker. Just when I think I'm out, they keep drawing me back in!
In other news, Beth and I celebrated "Year 2" at the Melting Pot on Tuesday night. It was great. Don't say "Fon-don't" - say "fondue!"
Comments
Re "Melting Pot". Best wishes to you both.
Posted by: John Hood | October 21, 2004 10:21 AM
Re: Year 2 - Congrats!
Posted by: dubbaplate | October 21, 2004 01:40 PM
Curious...
Was the original Sims also based on DirectX?
Posted by: Francois | October 21, 2004 03:58 PM
"Was the original Sims also based on DirectX"
Yes, DX7 I believe.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | October 21, 2004 08:12 PM
Congratulations to both of you! :-)
Posted by: Markus Wienberg | October 22, 2004 06:17 PM
I'll second (or third.. or {insert arithmetic series here}..) the congrats to Brad and Beth :)
Brad, I've been wondering how you deal with having multiple people working on a single project, especially as some of the people at Aspyr (and previously Westlake) we're not based in one place. Have you got any favorite SCM tools/techniques/tips?
Posted by: ben b | October 22, 2004 11:16 PM
One must take lead. It starts with a challenge
Example:
Brad: "John, don't cramp my style, man."
John: "Whatever, man. You don't even know."
Brad: "_I_ want to work on the rendering. YOU can work on the scripting and AI and play with Miles."
John: "Ah hell no, Carrot Top. I saw what you did with SWGB. _I_ worked on the first Sims. I call dibs on rendering. And I don't want to deal with Miles. Do we have to even use it on this project?"
Brad: "CARROT TOP? Whatever, Graceland. You wouldn't last a day at the Hutts! It's on!"
And then they wrestle. Thumb wrestle... over iChat.
The winner gets dibs, while the loser becomes El Lackio. That's Spanish for The Lackio and has to do whatever the winner doesn't feel like doing.
If there are more than two, then they tag team. Then the winners go one on one. It gets messy.
Posted by: a2daj | October 23, 2004 12:00 AM
Looking forward to the next iteration of MacMAME!
Posted by: John Hood | October 31, 2004 02:22 PM